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The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that managers in independent hotels can influence to improve organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) by examining the relationship between leadership style and OCB through newly developed balanced organisational culture and trust variables. Unlike most studies, which have been on chain hotels, this study investigates these relationships in independent hotels in Iran. Additionally, organisational size was also included in the study.

Using information from Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism, 160 independent hotels were identified and approached. A survey was assembled using well-known instruments. In total, 392 usable questionnaires out of 1,150 distributed were collected from employees and analysed using structural equation modelling.

Contrary to previous studies, it was found that in this context, neither transformational nor transactional leadership affects trust directly but only through balanced organisational culture, and only transactional leadership had a direct relationship with OCB. Also, organisational size had a moderating effect on the relationship between trust and OCB.

The authors add to the theoretical literature dealing with the different behaviour of constructs developed in a Western context in other contexts and suggests that hotel managers in a collectivist culture, like Iran, who want to build OCB can do so by creating organisational culture conditions (Balanced Organisational Culture) that foster trust between managers and their subordinates.

This paper aims to develop an integrative framework based on a convergence of embodiment, ecological and phenomenological theoretical perspectives to explain the multiple processes involved in the consumers’ mining, processing and application of brand-related sensory data through a sensory brand experience (SBE).

This research adopts a qualitative method by using face-to-face in-depth interviews (retail managers and customers) and focus group interviews (actual customers) with 34 respondents to investigate SBEs in the context of Chinese shopping malls.

Results show that the brand data mined through multisensory cues (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and taste) in a brand setting are processed internally as SBEs (involving sensory impressions, fun, interesting, extraordinary, comforting, caring, innovative, pleasant, appealing and convenient), which influence key variables in customer–brand relationships including customer satisfaction, brand attachment and customer lovemarks.

This study has implications for current theory on experiential marketing, branding, consumer–brand relationships, consumer psychology and customer experience management.

Based on the managerial perceptions from large firms, this paper aims to explore the emergence, growth and importance of corporate communications and how it is evolving and creating competitive advantage for Italian firms.

A qualitative approach is deployed, comprising in-depth interviews with senior managers from Italian corporations from a broad spectrum of industries, including: energy, telecommunications, automotive, transport, retail chain, appliances, technology and engineering, private shipping, government-owned holdings, marketing consultancy and construction.

The paper offers insight into corporate communications (corpcoms) practices in the sampled companies. The paper shows that corpcoms involves a complex range of activities leading to performance – managed and implemented under CEO direction.

Corpcoms is perceived as a strategic concept with effective application relative to managing corporate image and reputation. The findings offer insights for communication professionals who deal with corpcoms, branding and marketing communications.

Corpcoms can be viewed via the lens of social actors’ perspectives, i.e. via practitioners – including brand managers and senior executives, as they possess practical knowledge of business practice in specific contextual business settings and have the managerial ability and remit to design, implement and evaluate integrated corpcoms.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationships between digital technology, tangible/intangible assets and marketing capabilities to gain more insight into the factors related to small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs’) growth in the UK. Based on the resource-advantage theory, this research addresses the question “to what extent does digital technology influence marketing capability which leads to companies’ growth?”

Data were gathered through 21 in-depth interviews with managers from different multinational organizations and six focus groups with employees.

The study identifies the two key components of digital technology as information quality and service convenience. In addition, the relationships between digital technology, tangible/intangible assets and marketing capabilities perform the significant role of facilitator of a company’s growth.

The focus on UK SMEs limits the generalizability of the results. Further studies should be conducted in other sectors and country settings to examine the associations identified in the current study.

This study identifies the main impacts of digital technology on intellectual/physical assets. While managers and employees have specified that marketing capability is significant for organizations, there are a few other areas of concern with regard to consequences related to a company’s growth, competence and core competence, particularly in an SME’s setting.

This study aims to fill a gap in branding literature concerning the effect of corporate brand relationships on brand value through the case study method in a business-to-business (B2B) context. The objectives of this study can be framed in the following three questions: what are the main constituents of a corporate brand; how does a corporate brand generate tangible and intangible brand value for their business customers; and how do tangible and intangible brand benefits influence relationship initiation and management practices of the case companies?

The study adopts a qualitative multiple cases study design by using archival data and both in-depth telephone and online interviews with senior representatives of the case study companies to investigate corporate branding and associated issues in a B2B context.

From a managerial perspective, this study reveals that corporate business culture, brand relationships, products and corporate identity and personality as the main constituents of a corporate brand in a B2B context. The results show that a corporate brand can generate intangible and tangible brand value benefits for business customers. The findings also note the importance of brand value in enhancing relationship initiation.

The study contributes to the branding literature by developing a conceptual model that explains the development and role of the corporate brand in a B2B context with its associated value creation and brand management outcomes. The findings advance brand management literature on business relationships, which addresses a gap in B2B contexts rather than mainly about product brand management and value creation in business-to-consumer contexts.

Despite its significance, national culture is often underrepresented in the hospitality industry. Implementing tools such as the global leadership and organizational behaviour effectiveness (GLOBE), whilst valuable to a considerable extent, might induce false assumptions about the universality of managerial practices for hotels through purposefully ignoring the in-group variations within each cultural cluster. Because employees’ perceptions are deeply rooted in context-specific value systems, this study aims to challenge the tendency to adopt a globalized approach to leadership and management through investigating potential variations in employees’ perceptions in two countries in the south Asian cluster of the GLOBE.

Data were collected by using hard-copy and online convenience-sampling techniques from a sample of hotel employees and managers in Iran (392) and India (421). Structural equation modelling using AMOS 22 was adopted to test the hypotheses.

Both similarities and differences were observed between the Iranian and Indian contexts. The similarities confirm that GLOBE is correct to place them in the same regional cluster but the differences which relate to perceptions of organizational justice are also revealing. Whilst procedural justice affects organizational factors that influence employee motivation with the Iranian sample, distributive justice has no effect, whereas with the Indian sample these results were the other way around.

For scholars and practitioners, the authors show that organizational theories and concepts cannot necessarily be transferred from a Western context to other parts of the world without making adjustments for national culture and generalizations cannot even be made within regions of similar culture. For example, this study shows that in Iran organizational justice is perceived differently from how it is perceived in India.

This study extends the literature about the effect of national culture on the hotel employees’ cognitions and behaviours by shedding light on the divergence between countries within the same regional cluster in the GLOBE classification.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between corporate cultural/intangible assets and marketing capabilities by examining managers’ and entrepreneurs’ perceptions in a retail setting.

Nineteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with UK small and medium sized enterprise (SMEs) managers and entrepreneurs to identify six sub-capabilities that form marketing capability. The authors further validated the relationship between marketing sub-capabilities and its antecedent tangible and intangible assets. The qualitative approach used provided a deeper insight into the motivations, perceptions and associations of the stakeholders behind these intangible concepts, and their relationships with their customers.

The research identified that there is a strong relationship between tangible and intangible assets, their components and the following capabilities: corporate/brand identity management, market sensing, customer relationship, social media/communication, design/innovation management and performance management. In addition, companies need to understand clearly what tangible and intangible assets comprise these capabilities. Where performance management is one of the key internal capabilities, companies must highlight the importance of strong cultural assets that substantially contribute to a company’s performance.

Previous work on dynamic capability analysis is too generic, predominantly relating to the manufacturing sector, and/or focussing on using a single case study example. This study extends the concept of marketing capability in a retail setting by identifying six sub-capabilities and describing the relationship of each with tangible and intangible assets. Through extensive qualitative analysis, the authors provide evidence that by fully exploiting their embedded culture and other intangible components, companies can more favourably engage with their customers to attain a sustainable competitive advantage.

Although love has received considerable attention in the marketing literature, there is limited past research on love in a tourism context. This study aims to overcome past research negligence by proposing the concept of heritage destination love.

A qualitative approach was undertaken, face-to-face in-depth interviews with 35 respondents in London to discuss about the concept of heritage destination love antecedents and its consequences, tourists’ behavior and tourists’ feeling, passion and love about the destinations as playing a magnificent role in tourism development.

The outcome reveals that heritage destination love has three elements – passion, emotional attachment and identification.

Despite its limitations, the current study offers theoretical insights of the psychological theory of the love triangle in relation to heritage destination love.

When service failure occurs, it leads to dissatisfaction, lack of trust and avoidance behaviour among customers, and it can also be seen as a threat to the survival of the business. This paper aims to investigate the current and potential dynamics of service failure research within the tourism and hospitality area.

By adopting qualitative, quantitative (citation and text mining) and science-mapping tools (descriptive, conceptual and intellectual), this study analyses 99 key papers on service failure in 18 major hospitality and tourism journals over a 20-year span.

The research on service recovery strategies, recovery efforts, pre- and post-failure and post-recovery in the service encounter and the impacts of justice on post-recovery and post-complaint behaviour are identified as the major streams of service failure research. While emotional labour, rumination and satisfaction recovery were identified as emerging themes, service failure perceptions and social media were found as the developed and substantial trends.

This study presents a comprehensive understanding of service failure research development in the hospitality and tourism industry. This study propose three areas – circumstantial cues, interactional cues and crisis management – that practitioners need to understand to minimise service failure during the service interaction.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior bibliometric study has investigated the current and future dynamics of service failure in the hospitality and tourism industry and offered a research agenda based on this gap in the literature.